Mr. Worthington’s Beautiful Experiments on Splashes

Genine Lentine’s new chapbook, a finalist in the NMP/DIAGRAM 2009 chapbook contest, is a great debut. “Reading Genine Lentine’s poems–so ardent and playful, risky and affecting–I kept thinking that it’s not true, what René Char once said, that ‘no bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions.’ These poems plunge headlong into uncertainties of both language and life and, in doing so, they are so original that I often felt while reading them that I was in the grip of a brand new and still unnamed emotion.” –Richard McCann “These clear, refreshing acts of attention seem to wake us to another way of seeing, and to the problems and pleasures of saying what we see. Have we taken the act of speech for granted all along? In her short, formally inventive pieces–and especially in her dazzling long poem about language’s power and limits that anchors this collection–Lentine sounds like no one else. Her wry, astonished, aching voice is a fresh presence in American poetry.” –Mark Doty “Beautiful experiments from the spiraling ladder of someone who has spread out her root hairs and patiently attends the right words to assign; one who is there to honor the instant something shimmers before it disappears, be ‘it’ the meaning of ‘all this’ or the lack thereof, not unlike Mr. Worthington photographing a droplet’s splash he so ingeniously rigged to measure. And what doesn’t Genine Lentine’s aqueous breath expel–a disquisition on Softsoap, a sideways look at the motivational expression of Grenville Kleiser, the speed of sperm, along with a little consideration of the comma, the prefix un-, the contour of a vowel. Ms. Lentine’s experiments begin and end with the parent body as it breaks away, that ‘which asks nothing of us, only that we’re here for it.’” She is here. –C.D. Wright “These thrilling poems–restless, calm, reckless, wise–interrogate themselves by hovering over moments of aching beauty, as well as utter bewilderment, until they become the world itself.” –Nick Flynn